


Heart and nerve and sinew (burning)

by Meduseld



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Green Lantern (Comics)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Hal is the fire, everything burns pretty much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 20:35:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11238702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: Hal Jordan, through the years.





	Heart and nerve and sinew (burning)

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a quite from _If_ by Rudyard Kipling.

When Hal is five years old, Momma Jordan dies.

She’s been dying for years at that point, but it becomes imminent from one day to the next and his father hauls them out to Boca Raton, all the way across the country on a red-eye to say their goodbyes. Hal has no memories of her outside her dying-room, grey and faded, thick with the smell of illness. He has to trust his father and the old pictures in Momma’s endless albums that say she was young once, and beautiful.

When they get there she’s faraway, off in a land of memory and fantasy while the last earthly bits of her are dying. She doesn’t seem to know them. Hal’s father makes them walk up and kiss her cheek, anyway, then files them out the door as he prepares to sit with her until the end. When Hal is in the doorway, she calls him back.

She settles Hal on her lap and he’s surprised to see that it looks like someone is in there after all. She scrapes soft, arthritic hands on his cheek, and smiles with sad eyes. “You have a heart of fire, my boy” she whispers, so only the two of them can hear. “It’s going to burn everything you love”. Then her eyes go far away again, and her trembling voice asks who the boy in her lap is. Hal is ushered out one last time, and she dies within the hour.

No one ever asks what she said to him. He never tells anyone, either.

That doesn’t mean he forgets.

Five years later, Hal watches his father burn to death. Afterwards he can always feel the heat on his skin.

He fights, and flies, and fucks, and never ever slows down. He doesn’t know how.

But it’s not until he gets the ring, and everything that comes with it, that he knows that she was right.

Every fire, even green flame, has to be fed.

He thinks of her face in old pictures when Carol glows with violet light. He feels her hands on his face when Barry dies. He hears her voice when Sinestro gives in to a yellow ring. And when he feels Parallax’s teeth on his heart, he knows there is nothing left to burn.

It’s his turn to be kindling.


End file.
